This blog first appeared on From Poverty to Power. The Third UN Conference on Financing for Development (FfD), set to take place in Addis Ababa next year, will be a crucial opportunity to discuss two of the hottest topics in development finance today: the use of scarce public resources to leverage the private sector, and the fight against international tax avoidance and evasion. Both topics come together in Eurodad’s new report, Going Offshore, though probably not in the way you might expect. Previous Eurodad research has shown that despite the lack of public information about how they work and their impact on development, Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) – government-controlled institutions that support private sector projects in developing countries – have come to ...

New Eurodad report investigates private sector support by European Development Finance Institutions Tuesday November 4th Billions of euros intended for projects in developing countries are being routed through tax havens and are shrouded in secrecy, according to a new report released today (Tuesday November 4th). The report, Going Offshore, examines support given to private sector companies by Europe’s biggest Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) and the International Finance ...

Tax was one of the key issues tackled when Commissioner candidates faced MEP questioning in the European Parliament over the past two weeks. Junker’s lineup of candidates were being grilled on their policies – and every other imaginable issue ...

After strongly opposing any publication of data through corporate country by country reporting, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has been hired by the European Commission to do an impact assessment of public country by country reporting for banks in the EU. This has led more than 30 civil society organisations from across Europe to send a letter to the European Commission urging them to cancel the contract with PwC. Tove Maria Ryding, Tax Coordinator for the European Network on Debt and Development ...

On 7 April, the World Bank Group published a report on the first year of implementation of its policy on the use of Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs) – commonly known as tax havens – in its private sector operations. The report, which comes after repeated calls from civil society organisations for a stronger policy, fails to include the necessary information to make a proper assessment of the Bank’s implementation efforts. Once again, it exposes the inadequacies of the current policy in terms of tackling tax evasion and avoidance. The World Bank Group’s current policy, which was adopted in November 2011, requires its private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), to report to its Board of Directors on the implementation of its policy towards OFCs. This ...

After a year of many political promises to finally take action in the fight
against tax dodging, EU leaders met on December 19-20 but missed the
opportunity to make progress on tax information exchange by delaying – yet
again – the adoption ...

Monday 16th December 2013 European leaders should use their meeting this week to agree concrete action against tax dodging, civil society organisations (CSOs) urge in a new report. The European Council, which meets on 19th and 20th December, promised in May to crack down on tax dodging, which costs Europe around 1 trillion Euros every year. When it comes to the world’s developing countries, conservative estimates report that these countries lose between €660 and €870 billion each ...